Linear regulators exist in many electronic systems and can often play a significant role in reducing overall system power consumption. An ongoing trend in modern electronics design is the requirement for lower power consumption, particularly for portable devices, consumer products, remote devices, energy harvesting applications, and the like. Several architectures exist for creating regulators, but these are often limited in the range of output current they can supply. One of the problems presented by regulators is that the stability of the system is often a function of the load current. Thus, in low power regulators in particular, or regulators designed to handle a wide range of loads, the need for stability is not easily met. In such systems, as the load current increases, the output pole of the regulator tends to increase in frequency, and may compromise regulator stability. It is a significant challenge to design and build an efficient regulator that can nevertheless support a wide output current range. One approach that has been used to create a regulator with a wide range of output current is to set the regulator bias current as a fixed percentage of the output load current. This type of design allows for a wide operating range and low power consumption under light loads, but can result in unnecessarily high power consumption when operating under higher loads.
Due to the foregoing and possibly additional problems, improved apparatus and methods for regulator circuit biasing would be a useful contribution to the arts.